Thursday, May 26, 2016

Staunton, May 26 – The new Union of
Orthodox Military-Patriotic and Sports Organizations, Nikolay Mitrokhin says,
is “a classic Russian club combining the interests of the special services, the
criminalized or those suspected of links to criminal business, and the church
all presented in a patriotic package.”

As such, the Bremen University
specialist on the Russian Orthodox Church says, the group has an ostensibly
praiseworthy purpose of giving opportunities to poor children; but all too
often, he continues, it gives those poor children within its ranks to fight
others in the name of what their leaders want (sova-center.ru/religion/publications/2016/05/d34626/).

And while Mitrokhin does not draw
the parallel in this comment to the SOVA center, such groups inevitably invite
comparisons with the far-right groups like the Union of the Russian People and the
Union of the Archangel Michael which the church supported before the revolution
and which it, together with the state, used to terrorize the population.

Clubs like the ones the new union
brings together have existed for 15 years, the researcher says. They are
supposedly intended to give “youths from problem families” opportunities so
that they won’t get in trouble on the streets but have a new purpose in their
lives. To the extent they are that, he adds, they are worthy of praise.

But “at the same time,” Mitrokhin
continues, such young people “can be used as a defensive force against other
young people” whom the church and perhaps the state behind it view as a
threat.Then, such clubs can only be
condemned as a threat to the country’s constitutional order.

There is an additional problem, he
says, about which many prefer not to speak: “When under-age children are
constantly in a monastery, the question arise about their possible sexual
exploitation, also a reality of present-day Orthodoxy.”

The directions this new union may go
are possibly indicated by its leadership.Among them is Oleg Lisov, a former internal forces soldier with the
Sofrinsky brigade who worked closely with Gazprom and is suspected of having
ties “also with other criminal structures” as well as with pro-military Kremlin
structures.

“For the church,” Mitrokhin continues,
“this is a quite typical situation” in which it has connections to extremist
nationalist and even criminal groups, but exactly what these ties are in the
present case, he says, requires more investigation before any final conclusions
can be drawn with certainty.

There are precedents, however. “This
is not the first such union of this kind: they appear approximately once every
two years,” when government grants run out and when groups have to compete for
new ones, Mitrokhin points out.How
active such entities are depends on financing, and of course, the monastery in
Moscow has sufficient funds for the new union to be very active.

Just how “socially dangerous” are these
groups?“This depends both on the
approach of the isntructors and on the concrete situations where they can
manifest their aggression.” In principle, such groups could play a positive role;
but if the instructors are “professional soldier[s]” or policemen, then “not
infrequently” from these groups emerge “bandits or Nazis.”

But beyond any
doubt, this new Orthodox grouping is part and parcel of a larger phenomenon,
the privatization of force in Russia, something that increases the criminal
situation in the country and allows the Kremlin to attack its enemies with
plausible deniability. (For discussions, see dw.com/p/1ItsB
and echo.msk.ru/programs/exit/1770106-echo/.)

As such, this group and others like
should be subject to the closest scrutiny.